SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced the introduction of SAS Innovation Analysis, an application service provider (ASP) solution that delivers patent intelligence to life sciences, hi-tech, consumer packaged products and manufacturing firms that depend on comprehensive analyses of their own and their competitors' patent rights to make more informed strategic business decisions.
Available now to customers worldwide, SAS Innovation Analysis uses a concept-based pattern recognition algorithm to probe a 15TB database of patent submissions from virtually every patent office in the world. Going beyond existing software that offer only keyword search capabilities, SAS Innovation Analysis instantly identifies concepts with the same meaning; for instance, a SAS Innovation Analysis search for "cup" would return patents relating to "cup", "glass", "tumbler", "goblet", "mug" and "containment vessel for consumable aqueous solutions", among others. This functionality allows users to rapidly differentiate patents that contain true innovation from those that are simply functional forgeries using different words.
"Successful companies pay careful attention to the contribution of their intellectual assets to business performance," said Carol Rozwell, Vice-President and Research Director, Life Sciences for Gartner.
"Unfortunately, many firms with extensive patent portfolios have unexploited opportunities and unrecognised threats. A patent office mining solution brings these issues to light and supports better, faster decision-making across the organisation."
SAS Innovation Analysis can play a key role in many facets of the business:
* New product development - SAS Innovation Analysis quickly identifies opportunities and threats early in the research and development process, long before large expenditures are devoted to a project.
* Mergers and acquisitions - SAS Innovation Analysis enables users to select potential merger and acquisition targets, uncover verifiable data that supports proper valuation, identify potential roadblocks in selling acquired products, and ensure that all critical patent rights can be secured.
* Patent litigation and patent enforcement - SAS Innovation Analysis can quickly and cost-effectively find relevant prior art that could invalidate patents owned by a company or its competitors.
"Innovation is the lifeblood of every business, and patents play a critical role in protecting innovation," said Jim Davis, senior vice-president and chief marketing officer of SAS. "In today's hi-tech business world, the stakes are huge and the window of opportunity can close in the blink of an eye, so companies must have a single, comprehensive picture that fully probes the strengths and vulnerabilities of their own and their competitors' patents. SAS Innovation Analysis provides the insight to help executives make strategic decisions relating to their patent rights."
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SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40 000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 of the 2003 Fortune Global 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know.
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